New "Ivy Bridge" ultrabooks are arriving, and the Sony VAIO T13 (SVT13112FXS) is a nifty example. It's a fast, handsome ultrabook for the value price of $800.

Like a surfer waiting for the right wave, Sony sat out the first generation of ultrabooks. But now there are two new waves hitting the shore: ultrabooks with Intel's third-generation Core "Ivy Bridge" processors; and models with more affordable price tags thanks to the use of conventional hard drives plus small flash caches, as pioneered by last year's Acer Aspire S3 ($899.99 direct, 3.5 stars), instead of solid-state drives. So instead of costing $1,000 and giving you 128GB of storage, the Sony VAIO T13 (model: SVT13112FXS) costs $799.99 (direct) with 500GB, while its Intel Core i5-3317U chip gives it performance that matches or beats the first crop of ultrabooks. Battery life is fine, and fit and finish are wonderfulthe VAIO T13 looks and feels like an executive-status-symbol laptop costing much more.

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What's not to like? Well, hard drives are heavier than SSDs; the T13 weighs 3.33 pounds instead of under 3 poundsalthough we've seen 13.3-inch ultrabooks ranging from the 2.5 pounds of the Toshiba Portege Z835-P370 ($1,049.99 list, 4 stars) to the 3.25 pounds of the Editors' Choice HP Folio 13-1020us ($899.99 list, 4 stars). The keyboard isn't backlita deliberate decision on Sony's part, a company rep told PCMag, for the sake of key travel and typing feel. And video and presentation buffs will bemoan the absence of Intel's Wireless Display (WiDi); connecting the T13 to an HDTV set requires plugging a cable into its HDMI port.

Otherwise, the VAIO T13 is a fast, attractive productivity partner and the best value we've seen in the ultrabook segment so far. If this is what the "Ivy Bridge" generation is going to be like, Intel's goal of bringing ultrabooks from niche to mainstream just might be within reach.

Design
Crafted out of aluminum and magnesium with a burnished silver finish, the 0.7-by-12.7-by-8.9-inch (HWD) T13 is shaped like a book or slab with a beveled front edge rather than a MacBook Air-style wedge. A chrome strip at the rear holds two small feet on its screen hinge that, as you open the lid, lift the keyboard to a slight typing angle on your desk (and dig ever so slightly into your knees with the computer on your lap).

The chiclet-style keyboard lacks dedicated Home, End, PgUp, and PgDn keys but has a nice layout, with Ctrl and Delete in their proper lower left and top right corners, respectively. It does have a good, if fairly firm, typing feelmore reminiscent of the Toshiba ultrabooks' than the HP Folio's. The buttonless touchpad glides and taps smoothly.

The 13.3-inch screen shows a little flex when grasped by the corners but no flimsy feel or jiggle while typing. It offers the same 1,366-by-768 resolution as most ultrabooks, with a highly glossy or reflective surface but sharp colors and ample brightness. The T13's audio isn't the loudest we've heard but still produces enough volume to fill a room, with clear high and middle tones if not a ton of bass.

Features
The VAIO T13 has a good variety of ports, with no clumsy dongles or adapters required. Two USB portsone 2.0, one 3.0 with charging for handheld devicesare on the left side of the chassis. Both HDMI and VGA portsa boon for using a variety of monitors and projectorsand an Ethernet porta boon for office networkingaccompany a headphone/microphone jack and an SD/Memory Stick Pro Duo card slot on the right. For wireless connectivity, both 802.11n Wi-Fi and Bluetooth are standard; WiDi, as mentioned, is absent, as is the Intel Smart Connect Technology that lets some ultrabooks use a trusted Wi-Fi network to periodically update email or social network posts while the computer's asleep.

Intel's Rapid Storage Technology, by contrast, is present and accounted for, helping the 32GB SSD cache accelerate the 500GB rotating hard drive. The Sony VAIO T13 booted (from switched off to the Windows desktop) in a snappy 27 seconds and awakened from sleep in just 3 seconds in our stopwatch tests; the former is only a few seconds slower than, while the latter is virtually as quick as, fully SSD-based ultrabooks we've tested.

And while buyers of 128GB SSD-equipped ultrabooks are lucky to find 60GB or 70GB of free space when they take their systems out of the box, the Sony offers over 420GB free even with a system recovery partition plus a hefty software preload including Skype, Evernote, a Kaspersky Internet Security trial, and a handful of Sony's own utilities ranging from the VAIO Gate program launcher to a pair of programs for managing photos and videos.

Performance
Generally, the VAIO T13's "Ivy Bridge" Intel Core i5 (specifically, a 1.7GHz Intel Core i5-3317U ) behaves like the previous-generation "Sandy Bridge" Core i7 with the same 4GB of RAM. Its Cinebench 11.5 CPU benchmark score of 2.32 ties the Toshiba Portege Z830-S8302 ($1,429 list, 3.5 stars), and its PCMark 7 score of 3,383 is a few points aheadparticularly impressive when you consider that PCMark loves fast SSDs and the VAIO is pitting a 5,400-rpm hard drive with 32GB SSD cache against a full-fledged solid-state drive in the Portege.

The Sony also ran neck and neck with the Toshiba Z830-S8302 in our Handbrake video encoding test (2 minutes 3 seconds versus 1:59), though it fell behind in our Photoshop CS5 image editing test (4:40 versus 4:08). These results, however, were well ahead of those of "Sandy Bridge" Core i5 ultrabooks like the Dell XPS 13 ($999.99 direct, 4 stars), and they absolutely demolished those of what ultrabook shoppers could formerly find for $800a Core i3 model like the HP Folio 13-1029wm ($798 list, 3.5 stars).

The advent of "Ivy Bridge," alas, will not turn ultrabooks into hardcore gaming machines: While a couple of frames per second faster than its predecessors, the Sony managed only 19.5 fps in the DirectX 10 title Crysis and actually finished behind the Dell XPS 13 in the DirectX 9 tests 3DMark06 and Lost Planet 2.

That's a little disappointing, but the T13's battery life is anything but: While we were unable to determine the watt-hour rating of the sealed-within-the-chassis battery, the VAIO kept chugging for a solid 7 hours 18 minutes in our MobileMark 2007 rundown test. That's about an hour and a half less than the PC Labs ultrabook record set by the HP Folio 13-1020us , but the latter has a relatively large and heavy 59Wh battery.

With its fast performance and low price, the Sony VAIO T13 makes a strong argument not only for itself but for the two ultrabook categories we mentioned in the beginningmodels with "Ivy Bridge" processors and with hybrid hard drive/SSD storage systems. We think the former will soon be indispensable, though the latter will always yield to pure SSDs for speed. The T13 also yields to the HP Folio 13-1020us for battery life and keyboard comfort, though at $100 cheaper, it came close to unseating the HP as our ultrabook Editors' Choice.

Formerly editor-in-chief of Home Office Computing, Eric Grevstad is a contributing editor for PCMag and Computer Shopper, where he earlier served as lead laptop analyst and executive editor, respectively. A tech journalist since the TRS-80 and Apple II days, Grevstad specializes in lightweight laptops, all-in-one desktops, and productivity software, all of which he uses when commuting and telecommuting between PC Labs and a cat-filled home office in Boston. Email him at homeoffice.eric@gmail.com or follow him on Twitter @EricGrevstad....
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